Congratulations
on your appointment as NYPD commissioner. Like many New Yorkers, I feel optimistic
based on most of your public statements that you’re determined to build on the
progress made on public safety in your previous term at the department. I am
particularly optimistic that you are determined, at last, to set about reducing
the appalling toll of death and injury that motor vehicles exact from New
Yorkers every year.

I wanted to pick you up, however, on a puzzling
statement on January 15 atthe launch press conference for the mayor’s Vision Zero initiative. You said
pedestrians contributed to causing 73 per cent of pedestrian-motor
vehicle collisions last year and that pedestrian actions were directly
responsible for 66 per cent of those collisions. It’s a figure that on my
reading of the figures is demonstrably incorrect. I fear that, if the NYPD genuinely thinks this
figure reflects reality, it could seriously distort the department’s efforts to
reduce the grim toll of unnecessary suffering on our city’s streets.

Waiting for a new boss: NYPD officers
outside the new mayor's inauguration

I would be
interested to know the basis for your assertion – and grateful if you could put
the figure right if, as I am sure it is, it is mistaken.

Your
figure is implausible to start with. It implies that motorists - who stand
almost no chance of injury in a collision with a pedestrian, often drive at
high speed and are easily distracted – are more solicitous of pedestrians’
safety than the pedestrians themselves. That seems at variance with my experience of human nature as well as with my observation that pedestrians are
generally watchful when crossing city streets and motorists often cavalier when
driving on them.

The
statistic is also starkly at odds with all the research I’ve read either in New York or elsewhere on
the causes of crashes between motor vehicles and vulnerable road users –
pedestrians and bicyclists. For example, a study published in 2013 by NYU Langone Medical Center found that 44 per cent of pedestrians treated for injuries after collisions had
been hit in a crosswalk while crossing with the light. Another 6 per cent were
hit on the sidewalk. Given that some of the other victims will also have been
the victims of driver negligence – hit in unsignalised crosswalks, for example –
it is clear the majority of studied crashes were mainly drivers’ fault.

Typically dangerous pedestrian behaviour:
midtown Manhattan

A
more comprehensive study, published in 2010 by the city’s own Department of Transportation, attributed blame for 36 per cent of crashes that killed or seriously injured
pedestrians to driver inattention. It attributed another 27 per cent to
motorists’ failure to yield and said vehicle speed was a major contributor to
21 per cent of crashes. The DoT study reinforces the impression that, while
pedestrians undoubtedly cause some crashes, they are probably mainly to blame
for only a quarter or so of incidents.

Around
the world, a number of research studies have reached strikingly similar
conclusions. Many have attributed blame for crashes involving pedestrians and
cyclists to motorists in around 75 per cent of cases. For example, in London, where I lived and cycled for nine years until
August 2012, a Transport for Londonstudy of every reported motorist-cyclist collision in 2010 attributed blame for around 74 per cent of the crashes to motorists. Motorists’
inattentiveness, excessive speed and impatience are the main killers in every
industrialised country of which I’m aware. It's unlikely New York City is a freakish exception.

It might look to you like the outcome of negligent speed:
but there's an NYPD statistician who probably thinks
some pedestrian caused this.

Your
assertion also seems at odds with the evidence of the fatal crashes involving
pedestrians so far this year. I’ve been able to glean enough information about
four of the fatal pedestrian crashes up until Friday 17 to guess how blame
might be allocated. In only one – the death of Xiaoci Hu, killed on January 2
when a car ran into the back of another car that had slowed down to let him
cross mid-block – does the pedestrian appear to have carried even a portion of
the blame. The driver who struck Mosa Khatun on January 5 in Jamaica was
charged with failure to yield; the driver who hit Nydja Herring on January 11
in Parkchester has reportedly been charged with aggravated driving while
intoxicated; numerous witnesses attest that the driver who killed Cooper Stock
on January 11 hit him and his father in a crosswalk as they crossed with the
light.

My
concern is that a mistaken understanding of the present crisis’ causes could
lead the NYPD to pursue mistaken or counterproductive measures to halt it. If
pedestrian behaviour were indeed the cause of most pedestrian/car crashes, it
would be worthwhile and effective to work harder at changing pedestrian
behaviour. I note there are already reports of a police crackdown on
“jaywalking” around the area on 96th
street in Manhattan
where there has been a cluster of casualties this year. I can imagine it will
be tempting for local police precincts to seek in any crackdown to tackle
pedestrians and cyclists since they are, by their nature, easier to catch and
prosecute than drivers of fast-moving cars.

If,
however, cars cause the majority of crashes involving pedestrians and cyclists,
it will make far more sense to work at controlling drivers’ speed and ensuring
they yield when required to do so. I am worried that, with the crackdown on the
Upper West Side, you are beginning to pursue a
pedestrian-focused strategy – one that targets the victims and not the perpetrators.

The new mayor during his campaign: before he had a police
commissioner to explain how pedestrians were
killing themselves

My
personal conviction is that a concerted effort to tackle the traffic crisis’
real causes could yield dramatic results quickly. During my nine years in London, I covered transport issues in the UK and
elsewhere for the Financial Times, winning several awards. London,
which has a similar population to New York’s
and similar traffic volumes, suffers only half the annual traffic fatalities that New York does. Motorists’ adherence to speed limits and other road rules is noticeably
more lax in New York City than in London. I see no reason
why the introduction to New York of systematic
speed enforcement and a general culture of respect for road rules should not
quickly bring New York’s fatality levels
closer to London’s.

I
look forward to hearing from you about your figure’s origin and how it is affecting
your policies. I would of course be delighted to speak with you or your
officials about my concerns.

The NYPD and
other city agencies have it within their grasp to save hundreds of New Yorkers’
lives every year. It would be a tragedy if apparently mistaken data led you to
pass that opportunity up,

Monday, 13 January 2014

It was one Saturday in November that I happened upon one of South Brooklyn’s most thoroughly dysfunctional streets.
Seeking to take the Invisible Visible Boy for a trip to Brooklyn’s shorefront
greenway, I naively followed the cycle route signs pointing me down Brooklyn’s 3rd
Avenue towards the waterfront bike path. But,
after a little while, as I rode southward with the boy behind me on his trailer
bike, we found ourselves grappling with high-speed traffic heading onto and coming
off the highways around us.

The sign that tricked me into cycling down
3rd Avenue. To be fair, it doesn't read
Sunset Park (via traffic dystopia).

Then, as we rode into SunsetPark – a stretch of Brooklyn along New York’s harbour front, looking across to Staten Island- 3rd
avenue plunged into the shadow of the Gowanus
Expressway. The din of overhead traffic always in our ears, we found ourselves constantly
buzzed by high speed vehicles or cut off by cars turning into or out of auto
repair shops. The street seemed like as complete an example as one could
imagine of a street designed for motor vehicles with no thought for human
beings.

Look at this picture, readers. Then remember, with astonishment,
that the man who forced this road down this route died feeling
New York City was insufficiently grateful to him.

So it was a shock when I discovered that, until 1941, 3rd avenue
in SunsetPark was the heart of a thriving
community. The street was famous for its restaurants and the food shops that
supplied the area’s people – who were mainly immigrants from Norway, Sweden
and Finland. According to The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s classic biography of
Robert Moses, builder of much of modern New
York, it was only in 1941 with the opening of the Gowanus Parkway - since substantially widened and turned into an expressway - that it
started the decline into traffic-dominated squalor.

Moses insisted, despite pleas from the residents, on
building his parkway above 3rd
Avenue when it would have done far less damage
above 2nd avenue,
nearer the already industrialised waterfront. Moses dismissed the poor but
proud community in SunsetPark as a slum and
consequently not worth saving.

I’ve been pondering the Moses story particularly intensely
recently as I've noticed how often powerful individuals shape places’ urban fabric – and particularly people’s ability to get around
those places easily and safely. That’s in part because of the end of the term
in power of Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New
York for 12 years until December 31, and the start of
the term of Bill de Blasio. Bloomberg’s transportation commissioner, Janette
Sadik-Khan, pushed strongly for the introduction of new, better bike lanes
and pedestrian plazas, chipping away at some of the damage Robert Moses did by
making the city so dependent on cars. Bloomberg’s successor has promised to
continue making decisive changes on the city’s streets. It was part of his
election platform – and critical to winning his endorsement by StreetsPac, the
safer streets action group – that he promised to work towards eliminating pedestrian deaths altogether.

The George Washington Bridge over the Hudson:
the world's biggest political plaything?

In London, it’s becoming steadily clearer that
the efforts of the mayor, Boris Johnson, to provide both better cycling and
walking conditions and faster journeys for motor vehicles are collapsing under
the weight of their internal contradictions. In Toronto,
it’s one of the emblems of Toronto’s
general civic tragedy that its clownish, crack-smoking mayor has ripped out
some important cycle lanes. Over the past week, I’ve been watching how
political operatives in New Jerseyused traffic congestion to punish the mayor of Fort Lee, a small town by the GeorgeWashingtonBridge, apparently for
supporting the wrong candidate in the state’s gubernatorial election.

Taken together, the various cases illuminate some core
principles. It’s important that leaders have a clear vision for how they want
their cities’ transport systems to work and that they’re prepared to tackle
forthrightly the kind of obstructionism that almost any significant change to
the urban fabric creates. But it’s also vital that those plans are based in a
real, solid understanding of what’s going on at street level, that
they’re flexible when there are serious concerns and that the plans are carried
out within the rules of the political game. Leaders need to exercise the
self-discipline to put long-term policy goals ahead of the need to have
concrete successes to show before the next election.

Traffic stuck bumper-to-bumper on the Gowanus Expressway
on a quiet January Sunday: true testament to the success
of Robert Moses' road-building

Moses – who wielded power over aspects of transport and
planning in New YorkState and City in various forms from 1924 to 1968 – provides the most spectacular examples of what can
go wrong. In SunsetPark, he pushed the
elevated highway down 3rd
avenue because, he claimed, the existence there of
structures supporting a recently-demolished elevated rail line would make
construction along the avenue cheaper. But that probably wasn’t as decisive as
his simple conviction that the people of SunsetPark
were dispensable. It’s a principle he followed all over New York City and State when he encountered
people or environments for which he didn’t care. The more one knows about
Moses, the more one spots around the city problems – whether clogged,
disruptive freeways, crumbling subway lines or ugly, unsuitable public housing
projects – that could have been avoided if Robert Moses had been made to obey the
same rules about planning and due process that others followed.

Cyclists pedal on a dedicated lane over Copenhagen's
Dronning Louise Bridge. Key difference between these
lanes and London's Cycle "Superhighways": those in
Copenhagen are good, effective public policy.

On a far smaller scale, Boris Johnson’s initiative in London to build “Cycle Superhighways” along main roads exhibits a Moses-like deafness to criticism. No
cyclist shown plans for the “superhighways” – which are mostly simply painted blue strips along frighteningly busy roads – could have avoided concluding that riders using them would be terrifyingly vulnerable to the
neighbouring traffic. The desire to have achievements to show in the mayor’s
first term and a wish to devise a cycling policy distinctively different from
that of Ken Livingstone, Boris Johnson’s predecessor, seem to have trumped any urge for
mature reflection, however. Livingstone had developed the London Cycle Network of quiet routes along back streets.

The Cycle Superhighways look embarrassingly inadequate when
compared with the bike lane that Janette Sadik-Khan championed around a mile
away from the worst of 3rd
Avenue, along Prospect Park West in Park Slope. The
two-way protected lane illustrates, partly, the value of clear thinking and
good planning. The lane wasn’t built by pretending, as Boris Johnson has with the
Cycle Superhighways, that bike facilities can be built with no effect on motor
cars. It took away a lane of car traffic. Sadik-Khan, who had a strong record
of listening to the community boards that provide New York neighbourhoods with
a voice on planning issues, defended the decision to build the lane in the face
of legal action that has now rumbled on for years but served only to highlight
how well worked-out and widely supported the original policy was. Her stance
puts Boris Johnson’s insistence on following incompatible goals in his roads
policy to shame.

The George Washington Bridge's Fort Lee entrance
(albeit the bike, not car lanes). Taken last summer,
before politicians realised the scene's full potential.

Boris Johnson, however, has at least largely avoided the
ultimate transport policy error – of taking steps for purely short-term
political reasons. Those seem to have been the motives for the closure for four
days starting last September 9 of two of the three access lanes from the town
of Fort Lee, New Jersey,
onto the busy GeorgeWashingtonBridge
to New York City.
An official in the office of Chris Christie, New Jersey’s
Republican governor, seems to have ordered the closures to choke Fort Lee with traffic after the town’s Democratic mayor
endorsed the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Barbara Buono. The incident –
which held up school buses and emergency vehicles, as well as thousands trying
to get to work – was one of the most serious moral failings of transport policy
practice I’ve ever come across. New Jersey
appointees on the board of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the bridge’s operators, seem
entirely to have lost sight of the reason for the bridge’s existence and seen
it purely as a political tool.

Bill de Blasio fortunately seems unlikely ever to lapse into
such downright political cynicism. It was in a supportive spirit that I and
some other people concerned about road safety turned up outside his
inauguration ceremony on January 1 to remind him of his commitment to cut road
deaths. There’s a clear sense of optimism abroad that Mr de Blasio and Bill
Bratton, his new police commissioner, might have the courage to start tackling
New York City’s appalling road safety record – at the time of writing, the city
has already suffered nine traffic fatalities this year. Polly Trottenberg, Sadik-Khan’s successor, even came out ahead of the inauguration to talk to the Vision Zero
activists and to hear the heart-rending stories of some of the bereaved parents
who were there.

But, however optimistic the mood on January 1, I couldn’t
help wishing I’d been able to take Mr de Blasio with me on the trip I’d taken
the previous day, for a family trip to the New York Botanic Garden. To get to
the garden, more than 20 miles from my Brooklyn home, I rode up by Robert Moses’
Hudson River Parkway, taking in how it had cut nearly all western Manhattan off
from the city’s stunningly beautiful Hudson River waterfront.

I rode under the GeorgeWashingtonBridge,
glancing up to take in the traffic conditions. Then, towards Manhattan’s
northernmost

Two of the three cars that crashed in northern Manhattan
on Mike Bloomberg's last day as mayor: just another
part of the legacy handed Mayor de Blasio

tip, I encountered one of Moses’ most infamous pieces of civic
vandalism – Inwood Hill Park, a stretch of primeval forest that he wrecked by
needlessly driving a road right through its middle.

A scene we would have encountered on the way back would have
been just as instructive. On Broadway, by the bridge leading from the Bronx – which Moses’ road was meant to free from traffic –
I found a long traffic jam. At its head were three cars, crashed into each
other.

This, I might have told the soon-to-be-mayor, is the legacy
you’ve been handed. It’s a city still reeling from a mad effort to make it
almost entirely dependent on the private car - and plagued by regular, serious
car crashes as a result.

“Please remember the lessons of all the bad and weak leaders
who made it like this,” I’d have begged him. “Please try to make it at least a
little better.”

About Me

I'm a hefty, 6ft 5in Scot. I moved back to London in 2016 after four years of living and cycling in New York City. Despite my size, I have a nearly infallible method of making myself invisible. I put on an eye-catching helmet, pull on a high visibility jacket, reflective wristbands and trouser straps, get on a light blue touring bicycle and head off down the road. I'm suddenly so hard to see that two drivers have knocked me off because, they said, they didn't see me.
This blog is an effort to explain to some of the impatient motorists stuck behind me, puzzled friends and colleagues and - perhaps most of all myself - why being a cyclist has become almost as important a part of my identity as far more important things - my role as a husband, father, Christian and journalist. It seeks to do so by applying the principles of moral philosophy - which I studied for a year at university - and other intellectual disciplines to how I behave on my bike and how everyone uses roads.